Friday, February 20, 2009

Whiny Students and Unrealistic Grade Expectations

Well, there's this, according to which student expectations about grades are, well, laughable.

One of the more irritating things about being a professor is that you have to put up with a fair amount of whining, hostility and petulance about grades. You don't have to teach undergraduates very long before it dawns on you that at least a large minority of students expect good grades for mediocre work, and at least a 'C' for deigning to show up to class at all. When they find out that that's not on in my classes, they are shocked, baffled, and angry.

In a way, I have to say, I don't blame them.

Part of it's their fault, of course--many of them are spoiled, ridiculous people who have no business at a university. But a fair bit of the problem is the fault of parents, high school teachers and their other college profs. Students are, in general, not pulling their expectations out of thin air. Many of them have--or so they themselves tell me--grown up getting, e.g., awards for just showing up, and decent grades no matter what they do. They've been taught that 'A' is the default grade, and that if they really screw up, they might be given a 'B' as punishment...but that's about as far as it goes. In college, they've learned that they can drink too much, study too little, and still get respectable grades. It's the system they know. If you buck it, then you, my friend are the anomaly.

Now, there's a certain kind of professor who gets off on being mean. But we're not talking about those *ssholes here. We're talking about profs who have something vaguely like reasonable grading standards--standards according to which 'A' means something vaguely like excellent, 'B' means something vaguely like good, etc. There's a lot of territory between being a villain and being the candy man. These professors, the sensible ones between the extremes, very often feel under siege in today's university. An enraged parent called the Chair of my department an "asshole" last year because he--the Chair--gave the parent's kid an 'F' on a paper. The student had turned in a bad, partially-completed paper. When the Chair explained this to the parent, said parent cited all the money s/he was paying to the school, suggesting that the expectation was: good money for good grades. This is but one story among many.

Among the many bad consequences of the current system is that, as one of my colleagues put it, we have no grade to indicate genuine excellence. The student who does great work is lumped together with the student who does mediocre work, both receiving 'A's in many classes.

A more important consequence is: many students simply aren't really learning very much in college because we aren't making them do so. Most students--even many of the good ones--can be expected to do just enough in most classes to get the grade they think they need. They tacitly rely on us to tell them how much and what kind of work is sufficient to warrant that grade. Professors who have inflated grades are failing their students (and the rest of us) by misleading them about that. Professors set up the incentive structure, and very many of them are blowing it.

We're all of us being failed by this system because universities are turning out extraordinary numbers of essentially uneducated students. Many who graduate with honors should merely graduate, and many who graduate shouldn't. Granted, many of these people go on to take up fairly unimportant jobs where they can do little harm...but one certainly hopes that law schools, medical schools and graduate schools aren't subject to the same kinds of grading problems.

4 Comments:

Blogger Colin said...

I had a conversation with a pol theory professor awhile back about how she occasionally had to deal with parents of students in both undergraduate AND masters programs, which blew my mind to pieces.

That said, one of my friends who is doing an undergrad phil program at Western Michigan has been recognized for consistently good work by having profs work with him on getting stuff published in undergrad journals, having his input asked in a department-wide review, and receiving department awards. So I guess there are ways to reward and acknowledge excellent work beyond just marking something an A, although it would definitely be better if grades weren't so inflated.

Side note, for a laugh, find out who handles cases of academic integrity and ask how many of them have their parents call the chair or associate dean. (It's a lot.)

1:12 PM  
Blogger Colin said...

I had a conversation with a pol theory professor awhile back about how she occasionally had to deal with parents of students in both undergraduate AND masters programs, which blew my mind to pieces.

That said, one of my friends who is doing an undergrad phil program at Western Michigan has been recognized for consistently good work by having profs work with him on getting stuff published in undergrad journals, having his input asked in a department-wide review, and receiving department awards. So I guess there are ways to reward and acknowledge excellent work beyond just marking something an A, although it would definitely be better if grades weren't so inflated.

Side note, for a laugh, find out who handles cases of academic integrity and ask how many of them have their parents call the chair or associate dean. (It's a lot.)

1:12 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Well, helping undergrads publish is a good thing, but note that I said that we have no *grade* to indicate excellence. But, more substantially: we need some way short of helping them to publish to indicate genuine excellence. Many students genuinely do produce excellent work in classes--maybe even ten percent of them in some classes. They deserve 'A's, and they deserve to get a grade that is not also received by students who produce non-excellent work. 'Excellent' doesn't mean 'extraordinary to the point of being publishable.'

11:34 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Allow me to present the perspective of a (as in one) high school teacher.

I read this after grading a stack of high school tests in which I gave A+s to the majority of students. It made me blush.

However, a coworker told me the story of his first year at the school. He was called upon by the administration to explain why his grades were so low - he had been adhering to a system that resembling something like what you are talking about.

In addition to the administration frowning on teachers for "giving" (rather than recognizing) bad grades, you can imagine what the parents of private high school students are like.

(My grades are a somewhat special case - I still have no idea what I'm doing in the classroom, so my overinflated grades on this last test are balanced by a ridiculously too difficult last test that all my students failed.)


So, I guess basically the same picture on the HS level.

10:00 PM  

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